KATHIE LEE AND KIDS IN TEARS AS COYOTE KILLS BELOVED POOCH

NY Post ^ | February 1, 2003 | JOE McGURK

[SandfleaCSC]

Kathie Lee Gifford is grieving for her beloved dog, Chardonnay, who was killed near the family

[Pompah]

A hungry coyote beats a Bichon Frise Everytime.

[homeschool mama]

Kathy Lee Gifford isn't a lib.

[FRog2003]

That's why I keep my cat inside. He's perfectly happy and I don't have to worry about him.

[RichInOC]

That would work as well, but if the city and their neighbors didn't want the Giffords trapping the coyote, I imagine they'd have fits if Kathie took a rifle out back and started plinking at him, so I suggested the guard dogs.

[LurkerNoMore!]

It wasn't a poodle.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

Just one word, FENCING! It's not expensive.

[Senator Pardek]

A dingo ate your baby.

[Senator Pardek]

And it happens to be the town I was born in.

[spunkets]

""I found her lifeless body out on the ice surrounding our property."

That means a coyote didn't get it. A coyote wouldn't have left anything laying around. At this time of year, the male would have brought the food back to the den for the pups. They eat it and regurgitate it for, "baby food". At other times of the year there may have been some bigger bones left, but nothing recognizable as, "a lifeless body". This might have been done by stray dogs.

[LurkerNoMore!]

Yankee.

[Red Jones]

well, I certainly wouldn't mind if we killed the coyotes in the heavily populated areas. What people forget is that if you just leave the coyotes alone and never kill them or relocate them, then they will just thrive like crazy in suburban environments. If nobody attacks the coyotes they just get bolder and bolder. The coyote problem in LA and in Phoenix and obviously in Connecticut is just getting worse and worse.

But I keep my new cat in all the time now.

[Senator Pardek]

Cowboy.

[LurkerNoMore!]

Don't you mean, "And it happens to be the town in which I was born"?

[nunya bidness]

Hurry up. I haven't got all night.

[LurkerNoMore!]

Conn. born grammaticarians are so gay.

[Capriole]

For all the folks who advocate getting a shotgun and killing the coyotes that way: doing this gives you a moment of satisfaction, but it can't really affect the numbers of coyotes. Some studies have shown that if coyotes are killed off the survivors just breed more to replace the dead ones. They're so well-adapted to suburban living that their numbers grow. Trapping isn't successful for the same reason. The only thing that really works on them, as another poster indicated, is a pack of sighthounds, but even the sighthounds are not going to reduce the overall coyote population.

Coyotes in the neighborhood wouldn't be an entirely bad thing if they really helped control the deer population. But in general they don't. They prefer smaller, easier game, like cats, small dogs, rabbits, squirrels, little rodents, etc. Deer are too much work.

I don't know what the solution is. I don't like them eating my family cat, which they did a few years back, and I don't like them occupying an ecological niche once very nicely filled by foxes. It's a puzzlement. But it doesn't have anything to do with liberal politics. Human policies haven't so far had much influence on coyote numbers, no matter what was tried. Often you have liberal yuppie scum moving into a suburban neighborhood and then fruitlessly demanding that local authorities devise a way to keep the little puffball dogs safe. And there is no way, shotguns or no shotguns, traps or no traps. The moral of the story is: keep your little dogs and your kitties INDOORS unless you want them to be coyote snacks.

[nunya bidness]

Second!

Don't forget your bartenders.

[Red Jones]

Ya know if Kathie Lee had possesed a firearm this could have been prevented.

Keep dreaming! if Kathy lee had gone out and shot a coyote, then she'd be under arrest most likely, at a minimum the police would be looking for whoever did it.

When you're camping in a rural area and wolves come to your campsite and target your dog you are still not allowed by law to shoot the wolves. People are thrown in jail for that. My parents live right in the center of the phoenix metropolitan area. But there's a federal park within 6 blocks (papago park), the coyotes live in that park and come out every night looking for cats. Nobody is allowed to harm the coyotes. Get real. Only in a rural area you can get away with that and even there it is risky.

[Centurion2000]

Keep dreaming! if Kathy lee had gone out and shot a coyote, then she'd be under arrest most likely, at a minimum the police would be looking for whoever did it.

Well thank God for Texas ..... we can do that here.

[MHT]

I don't think that anybody really found it funny. However, Kathie Lee has made such a schtick out of her excesses in the past years that anything that happens to her seems out of proportion and like the set-up for a joke. The constant over-excitement over nothing, crying about everything, etc., has belittled truer and stronger emotions.

If only she had kept a little more dignity and privacy about her personal relationships and problems (particularly those with her husband), America would not know so much about her business. Rather than empathizing with her, it has become very easy for America to dislike her. After all, even some very conservative middle-class people have little natural sympathy toward someone who lives on a Greenwich estate with a brood of lap dogs, professional success, money, healthy kids, and unlimited opportunity.